hellonavi: A theme for Plymouth

Description

This Plymouth theme is based on the boot screen of the Navi computer, featured in the japanese series Serial Experiments Lain. It is a simple animation that replaces replace the default Plymouth theme.

Installation

Important note

The following instructions were tested in Kubuntu 16.10. The steps you'll need to take to install this software in your system may be different - don't make changes to your system if you can't reproduce any of the steps below in your system and you don't know how to adapt the instructions!

Instructions

1. Copy the hellonavi folder to /usr/share/plymout/themes

Recommended: At this point you should make a backup of the file /etc/alternatives/default.plymouth:

# cp /etc/alternatives/default.plymouth /etc/alternatives/default.plymouth.bak

2. Remove the symbolic link to the current plymouth theme.

# rm /etc/alternatives/default.plymouth

3. In /etc/alternatives/, make a symbolic link to hellonavi.plymouth with the following command:

# ln -s /usr/share/plymouth/themes/hellonavi/hellonavi.plymouth /etc/alternatives/default.plymouth

4. Update your initramfs so it includes the new theme

# update-initramfs -u

5. Done. The new theme should show up on boot and shutdown.

Additional notes

The test script included was only tested under Kubuntu 16.10 and will probably not work in most other flavors of Linux. It's probably best to manually adapt it to your system before running.

The Plymouth's theme folder may be located in /lib/plymouth/themes in some distributions

default.plymouth may be located inside of the themes folder in some distributions

Imagemagick can be used to convert GIF files into PNG files numbered upwards from 0. The command I use is below.

$ convert -coalesce input_file.gif prefix%01d.png

Thanks/Credits

• virpara from askubuntu.com, for the explanation on how to build a custom plymouth theme and the example code upon which hellonavi was based.

• dreamingusagi from deviantart.com, for the Lain Navi Os animation from which I took the visual assets used in this theme.